I have come to terms long ago for my purpose of furthering my education. This means I went to college for all the wrong reasons. Sure, my parents were proud of me, and yeah, it was probably the best 4 years of my life, and like a good little boy, I graduated. But my priorities were eat, sleep, party, eat, sleep, party, etc. Not too unlike the rest of my friends at the time. And besides, I got my degree…in communications (the most absolute vague degree anyone that doesn’t know what to go to college for majors in)…now it was time to go home and conquer the world.
Not so fast, hot shot. And boy, did I really believe I was a hot shot. The first major mistake, other than being completely un-motivated, I made was coming back home to live in the quiet, small midwestern town I grew up in. That’s right–I had all these plans to be a film maker or a director, or an editor or somethng to do with the movie business…and I settled for being a pizza delivery driver. But I still had that degree (I wound up paying dearly for for the next 18 years!) burning a hole in my back pocket, so the future, I believed, was mine for the taking. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been more pre-emptive about doing all that “taking the future” baloney.
Long story short–life happened–and as anyone who has graduated high school can tell you–time really does fly by. I got married, divorced, hired, fired and everything in between. Now it’s 2011 and almost 20 years since I graduated college. I have no other reason to believe that everything I learned about anything, especially in the growing world of electronics and technology, is absolutely obsolete.
These days, getting a college degree is as simple as calling a phone number or enrolling online–there are literally hundreds of choices to choose from, which is a good thing, if you don’t already have a degree. If you do already happen to have a degree, whether it’s dusty and warped and in some box in the attic you haven’t seen for 15 years or not, the career finding atmosphere is a little bit harder to breathe in, if you know what I mean. This was never made more clear to me until I heard one of my favorite old college professor’s tell me he’d hire me…if I had a Master’s degree.
This was recently reinforced when a family member with a solid career told me that anyone can get a college degree these days and that no one will look at you unless you have the almighty Master’s degree. Just what I wanted to hear. How long has it been this way? Where was I when the professional world sent out the memo that Bachelor degree’s were insufficient?
Must’ve happened one night when I was delivering pizzas…